Man releases book about daughter’s death

Bill McKinney once said the story behind his adoptive daughter’s mysterious death was “like a book.”

He spoke figuratively at the time.

Now, more than ten years after Monika Rizzo’s unsolved and highly publicized murder, McKinney has published the tale and titled it “The Raw Truth.”

After going missing in 1997, Rizzo’s bone fragments were found in the back yard of her home on the city’s Southeast Side. The case puzzled authorities and received national attention through the late 1990s.

The years-long investigation that followed her disappearance was riddled with contradictory DNA tests and erroneous public statements by police. Authorities eventually confirmed that a skull found behind the Rizzo household was the missing woman’s and deemed her death a homicide.

Her husband, Leonard Rizzo, was named a suspect but was never charged, and police say there have been no recent developments in the case. In early interviews, Leonard Rizzo said his wife was missing — not dead — and denied any wrongdoing in her disappearance. Apparently still a San Antonio resident, he did not return a call seeking comment.

McKinney has been an outspoken critic of the police investigation and still maintains that Rizzo killed his German-born adoptive daughter. At Monika Rizzo’s 1999 funeral, McKinney told the Express-News that the tale of her death would get its final page when Monika Rizzo’s killer is found and convicted.

He hopes to come closer to a conviction by publishing the narrative and once again bringing attention to his daughter’s death.

“I just wanted to see if we could get this book out there to satisfy the public, to satisfy me,” McKinney said.

McKinney said he didn’t initially plan to write it, but after years of gathering documents about the case, he was compelled to spell out his interpretation of what happened.

“It’s still an open case down in the basement of the police station, just collecting dust,” McKinney said. “There has been a lot of confusion, a lot of screw-ups and a lot of circumstantial evidence.”

McKinney said his book is a synopsis of his daughter’s life and death and the investigation that followed as seen through her family’s eyes.

“It’s not that the media didn’t report the truth,” McKinney said, explaining the book’s title. “It’s just that many times, through the editorial process, what reporters write is not always printed because of restraints on time and space. Nobody cut mine, and it’s in pretty good English.”